The Blog

This was a throttle test – we go from “start” throttle (~45%) to 55% to 50% to 60% to 50% and so on. The few seconds near the end where the dust cloud obscures everything is full throttle – or at least the valves are full open. The 50% throttle is still a bit off on mix ratio so you’ll hear some extra noise a couple of times when it is throttled down.

Our tank pressures are set a bit low (between 550 psi and 600 psi) during the test, so even with full flow the chamber pressure and thrust are only about 75-80%. We’ll probably tweak that up a little bit, we want at least 400 lbf thrust to be the “full throttle” for XA-0.1. This will get us a nice stately rise as it lifts off.

We’ll repeat this test in the very near future – right after we do some data crunching and fix a few things in the control code.

Nathan,
Alas, we probably won’t be posting quite that often. Just depends on how often we have something interesting/cool to talk about. Hopefully over the next several weeks as we ramp up to first flight we can keep the blog posts coming.